Luna Abreviado

Luis Luna Matiz (Bogotá, 1958) is a Colombian artist who lives and works between Villa de Leyva and Bogotá. His initial training in medicine at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (1976–1981), motivated by an early interest in psychoanalysis, was followed by studies in art at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano and later in the Art in Context program at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin (1983–1988). This trajectory—situated between science, symbolic thought, and artistic practice—would shape the interdisciplinary character of his work.

Since the late 1980s his practice has developed around the relationship between image, text, and cultural memory. His early artistic investigations engaged with the constructive thought of the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, while subsequent research trips to Mexico led him to work with mythic and colonial sources such as the Popol Vuh and the chronicles of the Indies. In 1991 he moved to New York with a fellowship from the Fulbright Program and received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1994). Since then his work has incorporated fragments of literary, philosophical, and historical texts into paintings, assemblages, and installations.

Travel and field research have been structural elements in his work. In 1994 he traveled along the Amazon River from Leticia to Belém do Pará, an experience that led to the project La Ruta del Caucho – Amazonas, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. During those same years he developed the series La Ruta de la Seda, inspired by journeys through Central Asia and Turkey.

After returning to Colombia in 1994, he established his studio in Villa de Leyva, where he deepened his study of the literature of Nueva Granada and various hermetic traditions. His work incorporates Gnostic texts, references to alchemy, and the iconography of Francisco de Goya, articulating these sources with contemporary visual structures. In several recent series he employs geometries inspired by the tessellations of Roger Penrose, assembled in iron plates that he refers to as Entropies. These works suggest a field of correspondences between ancient cosmological visions and certain contemporary models of scientific thought, where order, fragmentation, and transformation become formal principles.

Working across media that include painting, printmaking, assemblage, site-specific installation, and technologies such as augmented reality, Luna constructs complex visual systems in which literature, history, science, and symbolic traditions converge. His work proposes an expanded reading of Latin American cultural memory, where different temporalities and forms of knowledge intersect within a single visual structure.